How The Haven helps young people develop social communication skills

The question we are asked most

Can an online school really help a young person develop social communication skills?

It is a fair question and we would rather answer it directly than have it decided in the abstract.

The comparison usually being made is between The Haven and a mainstream school where a young person is present, included and communicating with her peers every day. If that school exists for your young person, take it. We mean that.

But for most of the families who reach us, it does not. The real comparison is between The Haven and a bedroom. And a young person who is not with other people is not learning to be with other people. Isolation is not a neutral holding position while a placement is argued over. It is a year of her life in which nothing about communication gets easier.

Online does not mean alone

We think some of the doubt comes from picturing something we are not. The Haven is not a login and a worksheet.

Our learners are in live, small groups, with the same educators and the same peers, in six-week blocks across the year. The groups are small enough that nobody disappears. Alongside lessons, every learner has mentoring, and access to clubs, entrepreneurship, Neurodiversity University and Preparing for Adulthood as standard.

They talk to one another every day. In voice, in chat, in reactions, with the camera on or off.

That last part matters more than anything else. You do not have to turn your camera on. You do not have to speak out loud. That is not us expecting less of your young person. It is us removing the one condition that has been stopping her communicating at all. When participation has more than one door, a young person who cannot walk through the first one is still in the room.

What happens next is the part that surprises families. Cameras come on. Someone unmutes to answer a question, then to ask one. A learner who arrived unable to speak becomes the person who talks most in the group. Friendships form between young people who had been told they would struggle to make them.

CASE STUDY
Erin’s first term

Erin is an illustrative composite, drawn from patterns we see across our learners. She is not a single real young person, and no detail here belongs to an identifiable child.

Erin was thirteen when she started with us, and had not been in a classroom for eighteen months. She was bright, well ahead in English, and had not spoken to anyone outside her immediate family in nearly a year.

Her mum told us at registration that she did not think Erin would manage a live lesson. We said that was fine, and that she should come anyway. For the first three weeks of Back to Balance, Erin’s camera was off and her microphone stayed muted. She did not type in the group chat. What she did do was arrive, every session, and send a single private message to her educator afterwards, usually one line about the work. Her educator replied to every one.

In week four she used a reaction on someone else’s answer. In week six she typed in the group chat for the first time, correcting a date in a history discussion. In week nine she unmuted to answer a direct question, and stayed unmuted for the rest of the session. By the end of Back to Balance she was in a club, messaging one particular learner between lessons, and had told her mentor that she wanted to try camera on for one lesson a week.

She is now working towards iGCSEs, and speaks in most lessons. She still has days where the camera stays off and the chat does the talking, and that is not treated as a step backwards. The part her mum tells people about is not the exams. It is that Erin sat in an annual review last term and explained, out loud, to four adults, what she needs in order to communicate. She had the words for it because she had spent two terms at The Haven working out what her own communication actually is.

Nobody taught Erin social skills. She was given somewhere her communication worked, and she built from there.

Why a neurodivergent setting helps rather than hinders

We do not run separate social skills lessons. That is a position, not an oversight.

Social communication is learned where it is used, in real relationships, with people who are consistent and known. It is not a subject. It is the whole week.

Most of our educators are neurodivergent themselves. So are all of our learners. That is not a smaller social world, it is a more successful one, and there is research behind why.

One of our writers, who is autistic, describes communicating with non-autistic people as speaking a second language. You can read her piece here: Autistic communication, the language barrier.

Nobody becomes fluent in a second language by being dropped into a foreign country with no teaching, no shared vocabulary, and a social penalty every time they get the accent wrong. Fluency is built outwards from a first language you already have. A young person who has never once been understood on her own terms has no base to build from. The Haven is where she gets that base.

Masking is not communication

There is something else worth naming, because it is usually the missing piece.

For a lot of autistic girls, coping with the social world has meant masking. Copying, scripting, monitoring, holding it together all day and for some, falling apart at home. It looks like coping from the outside, which is exactly why it goes unnoticed for years, and it is associated with poorer mental health.

Being present in a mainstream classroom is not proof that social communication is developing. In the young people who reach us, it is very often what came immediately before the crash.

If the aim is for your young person to manage in the social world, the question is what builds something that lasts, rather than a performance she cannot sustain.

A bridge, not a destination

We would never argue that a young person should learn online, alone, forever.

Autistic Girls Network runs in-person groups around the country, and a number of Haven learners do both. Our learners could go on to college, sixth form and apprenticeships. Preparing for Adulthood is built into the week from the start, and it covers the real things: explaining yourself, asking for what you need, disclosure, work and further education.

The sequence is what matters. Safety, then relationship, then the wider world. Where that order gets reversed, the outcome is usually the position your young person is in right now.

For professionals and commissioners

If you are an Educational Psychologist, SENCO, caseworker or Head assessing whether The Haven can meet a young person’s social communication needs, two evidence bases are relevant.

The double empathy problem (Milton, 2012; Milton, Gurbuz and López, Autism, 2022) reframes autistic communication difficulty as a mutual breakdown between differing communication styles, rather than a one-sided deficit. Crompton, Ropar, Evans-Williams, Flynn and Fletcher-Watson (Autism, 2020) found that information transfer between autistic people is as effective as between non-autistic people, and that it degrades across mixed neurotype pairings.

The implication for provision is direct. A setting in which peers and most educators are neurodivergent is not a reduced social environment. It is the environment in which a young person’s communication is most likely to succeed, be understood and generalise. Skill built where communication works is more durable than performance sustained where it does not.

We would also say this: where a face-to-face element is indicated, specify it alongside The Haven rather than using it to rule us out. This is a both/and.

We are glad to talk through how communication is developed, tracked and evidenced here before you finalise your advice. We would far rather you interrogated the provision than declined the category.

Talk to us

If this sounds like your young person, or like a young person on your caseload, get in touch. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right fit.